Ladies and gentlemen, it's Friday. It looks like we made it. I am so excited that everybody's here. I got a great show for everybody today. I hope the birds are singing. I hope the sun is shining and I hope that the wind is at your back. Ladies and gentlemen, Get ready to meet a true force of inspiration, a man who doesn't just talk about breakthroughs but creates them wherever he goes. Brian Biro is America's number one breakthrough speaker, a best-selling author, and a master at helping people and organizations unlock their fullest potential. Brian has a gift for making everyone in the room feel like the star of the show. Through dynamic storytelling, practical wisdom, and... infectious energy that electrifies his audience. Brian inspires individuals to believe in themselves, push past their limits, and rise to their absolute best, all while having a blast. With a foundation of excellence built at Stanford and an MBA from UCLA, Brian's journey began as an award-winning swimming coach, leading his team to top ten national success and earning the prestigious United States Swimming National Coaching Excellence Award. From there, he took his leadership talents to the corporate world, where he transformed a transportation company into a revenue quintupling powerhouse. But Brian's true calling emerged when he combined his business acumen, coaching brilliance, and unparalleled motivational skills to become one of the most sought after speakers in the world. His client list is a who's who of industry giants, Starbucks, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Kaiser Permanente, and even the US Army and Navy, to name just a few. With a presence that spans fifteen countries and countless stages, Brian's impact is nothing short of transformative. So if you're ready to dive into the world of breakthroughs, ignite your potential, and feel the spark of limitless possibilities, join me in welcoming the incredible Brian Biro. Brian, thank you so much for being here today. How are you? I'm great, George, and you already scored points because we're ready to dive in. We swim coaches love that kind of terminology. It's all in the language, right? It's all in the words we use. They become our internal dialogue. I'm not even sure where to start right here, Brian, but I, I thought maybe I gave a pretty good background of who you might be and what you got going on, but you got a new book coming out and you do have this electrifying presence. Is that something you've always had, or was that something you had to build within you? You know, George, I've always loved people. I believe that we have an incredible amount of possibility in us. Um, My mentor, who was the greatest coach of all time, in my opinion, was John Wooden. Actually, if you're watching, he's on the screen behind me back here in a picture with me. Coach Wooden sometimes said, often said, there are no overachievers. And what he really meant to say is that we have more in us than we think we do. And that's been kind of the central theme through all three of my really neat careers. My first career as a U.S. swimming coach. Even though I was coaching swimming, I was coaching people. That's what we do. It's helping to overcome those fears, those obstacles, those doubts, those things from our background that kind of become the chains that hold us back. And, you know, I loved it. And really the key thing that brings me the greatest joy, because I coached fifty years ago, and as I look back on it, what brings me the greatest joy? my swimmers are still in touch with me and what they talk about. And, you know, I still call them my kids, even though they're sixty years old, they're still my kids. What they tell me is that it was the life lessons that they learned that really made the biggest difference. And I'm more proud of the people they've become than all the wonderful swimming results that we created. So that first career really taught me that we really are in the people business no matter what it is. The second career I started because unlike probably most people who go in the corporate world, I'm probably the only guy you know, George, who went to get an MBA to get a life instead of a job. The only reason I left coaching was I had no life. I had no balance at all. All I knew myself was as a coach. I wanted to know myself as a human being. I wanted to know myself. I wanted a family. I wanted to have a much, much richer full life than just what I did. And I did. That's when I really got in great physical shape. I started running and did marathons when I was going to grad school, ended up going into the transportation industry. And the funny thing is I didn't give a hoot about transportation. All right. What I loved was people. And again, what I found there was really the team building side, because when I went into my corporate career, I was amazed because this is a commonality in a lot of companies. There was three groups. There's operations, sales, and the home office administration. Operations hated sales. Sales hated operations. They both hated the home office just a little bit more. And to me, that just made no sense. And so my work in the corporate arena ended up turning silos into synergy. I started doing team building events in our own company because operations people don't want to do sales. And sales people don't want to do operations. And neither one of them wants to do the home office stuff. And so we started embracing those differences instead of pushing away from each other. And that's what turned us around. It wasn't the market. It wasn't the this and that on the outside. It was us on the inside learning to truly appreciate one another, to pat each other on the back instead of kick each other in the tush. And it was a great, great experience. And at the peak of this incredible turnaround, I said to my wife, honey, we're doing great. Let's quit it. I want to go do this for real. This is what I was put on earth to do. And so for thirty five years now, that's been my life is is being America's breakthrough speaker and actually bringing it to other parts of the world because I have this great faith that started way back when that there are no overachievers. So we have more on us than we really even sometimes dream about. I love it. I love it. I have a background in the transportation industry and I can echo the sentiments of I'll even go as far as to say borderline hatred for the two sides on some levels. You know, it's so it's so. It's crazy in there to think that you're all on the same team, but you're just fighting each other at a level that stops productivity in its tracks. Like, I'm not going to do it. You do. Yeah, it gets so crazy. But it's amazing to see. How do you get people that far apart to just stop for a minute and realize they're on the same team? You know, it comes down to probably the most important thing that I teach of all. And it's on an individual basis. But when you expand it throughout an organization, it becomes unstoppable. And it's what I call being fully present. And what I mean by that is when you're fully present, a hundred percent of your mind, body and spirit is with the people you're with where they are now. Now, how many of us have ever been with somebody where, you know, their body's present, but the rest of them is in another county? And here's a tough but important question to ask about that. How does it make you feel when someone you wish to be fully present with you is not fully present with you? You know, how does it make you feel when somebody you really want to connect with is much more interested in their cell phone while you're talking than they are at listening? Well, for everyone I've ever known, it makes them feel worth less, makes them feel unimportant and insignificant. And our job, no matter what role we have in our lives, whether it's parents, whether it's business leaders, whether it's sales professionals, whatever we do, our job, I believe, our job is to help the people that we lead, that we serve, that we love, that we care about, to know they're important, to know they're significant. Because when people feel important, they rise to, oh, yeah. When people feel unimportant, they fall to, oh, no. And so in a very practical application of this, and it's a funny story as I look back on it now, but when I was a vice president in charge of sales and marketing in this transportation company, my office was right next door to the COO who was in charge of operations. Well, we never were in the same room together, even though there's a little three inch wall between us, unless we had to be in a meeting together and then he'd sit on one side, I'd sit on the other side. And then one day I started really getting into the things that led to the team building events. And that's when I really started to understand that the greatest gift we ever give to another person is to be fully present. We never talked about anything except our sides of our business. So one day, I walked around the corner into his office with no agenda, not talking about the next shipment's out. And I just sat down in a chair. And for an hour, we actually talked about life. I started noticing stuff. I was running marathons at the time. He was a long-distance bike rider. We had that commonality of knowing what it feels like to train for something that's pretty tough. I saw the pictures of his kids and his family. I never saw them before. They were next door. So we just talked about who we were and what was important. And when we emerged from that little talk, I realized something that if you really pay attention to the people on your team, it's almost always the case. He wanted things to be good for the people in the company as much as I did. We were just looking at it from different sides that were important different sides to see from because together they could be unstoppable. After that one hour of sitting together, we never ever had a sales meeting without operations present. We never had an operations meeting without sales being present. And we started kicking tail. We started doing so well. We started getting creative. We started, and it was fascinating because it was a time when our marketplace, we were the biggest company in terms of transportation to and from Alaska. And at that time, the industry was way down because interestingly, the price of oil was too low. And so there's no construction going on. And we thought, oh, we're in trouble. That's our market. Well, guess what? There's a lot of markets that we could probably do well in if we just start to think more creatively. And that's what happened. We had the most fun. We added jobs. We quadrupled our size. We became number one in our industry for customer service and convenience. And when I left the company to do what I did, The leader of the people in our company after that was that COO because we have taught each other how much it means to be present with each other. So if you start doing that on an individual level, what you say whenever you're present with somebody is the most important words you could ever say. Without saying them out loud, by being present, you say to them, you are important. You matter. You can't. You know, and George, I want to say this because life is about the whole person. It's the greatest gift you can ever give your children. Be fully present for your children. I call it the gift because the greatest gift I've ever received was from my two daughters. Their names are Kelsey and Jenna. They were only eight and three at the time. And one night when I was so caught up in my work, like I was every day, and I could have been tucking them in and saying goodnight and being present with them and letting them know they were the most important people in the world to my wife and I, I was reaching for the phone, like always, and they came up to me And they grabbed my heart and they shook it. And they changed everything in my life and gave me a compelling why, a passionate purpose that has been my life ever since. They asked me, Daddy, do you love your phone more than you love us? I felt the blade go in deep. Emerson said, what you do screams so loudly, I can't hear a word you're saying. And I couldn't fake it. I was living my life as if my phone was more important than my children. From that day on, I changed my whole focus. And my number one goal was to be present. I made up my mind I would never, ever book more than seven events a month to the speaker. No, I don't care what you pay me, I won't do it. That I would be home at least fifteen days a month. When I was home, I would make them breakfast, take them to school, be there after school, never miss one of their dance performances. And I lived it my whole life. And I thought I was doing it for them. Do you know that every dimension of our life elevated with the decision to be more fully present? You don't get less done being present, you get more done. Because you're full out, full there. My mentor, John Wooden, the guy in the picture above, ran some of the shortest basketball practices in college basketball. But every moment was fully present. There was constant movement, constant direction. Nobody's sitting around wasting that time. And as a result, his teams became legendary. So, you know, the past is history. The future, a mystery. The gift is now. That's why we call it the present. I love it. I love it. One of my favorite quotes from John Wooden is what you give in life, you get to keep and what you fail to give, you lose forever. And everything you said is transformative. And I agree wholeheartedly. However, Do you think it's more difficult when you're coming from a place of scarcity? It's so much more difficult if you're living paycheck to paycheck, if maybe you are behind in some bills. Do you have the time to be present? If you can't call in sick because your kid needs some tuition money or you can't call in sick because the electric bill is going to be turned off, how do you be present then? You know, it's a tough question, but it's an important question because presence is, let me put it simply, five minutes of being present is worth five hours of taking it. So it is actually the secret to life balance. In fact, there is no life balance. Most people think that balance in life is about equal time. Let's clear that up, George. You know it already. We ain't going to have equal time. You know, there's forty eight hours of stuff to do no matter who you are and only twenty four hours to get it done in. But again, five minutes of being present with that child, five minutes of being present with somebody who needs you in that moment is worth five hours of faking it. And you can't fake it. I mean, you know when somebody's present or not. And so you may not have five hours to be present. But if you really focus in on those five minutes, I called my little grandson today. He's eight years old. First thing this morning I called him because yesterday my daughter sent me a video from school of him talking and speaking in Spanish. He's in a Spanish immersion program. And it was kind of like his oral exam, if you will, speaking with the teacher. And he did such a great job. And I called him up on the phone, which was kind of a cool thing. I don't think he'd had a lot of phone calls in his life at eight years old yet. And I just told him how incredible he was and how proud we are of him. It took me one minute because I knew he was off to school. But that one minute, I think, might stay with him for a long time. It'll stay with me. So that's the secret. Life balance is really about life rhythms. And the rhythm comes by putting even a few more minutes a day to being fully present with someone. If you have to do a million things, say, I only have a minute, but in that minute, be fully there. And that's, for most of the time, that's plenty. That's enough. They'll get it. They'll get it where it counts. And you'll start to develop that muscle until it's who you are. You know, people have looked at John Wooden forever and tried to figure out what made this guy the greatest of all time. And they miss that. His greatest strength. His greatest strength was I've never met a human being who was more fully present with you. When you were with him, you felt like the legend because he made you feel that way. He was so tuned into you. And, you know, he's really one of the people who taught me most of how powerful that is. Because the first time I sat down in his living room and talked to him for a couple hours, we became friends. When I walked out, I felt like, man, he was interested in me. Who am I? I'm sitting across from the greatest there ever was. But that's the way he was with everyone. And as a result, he got more done in less time and made more connection in less time. And we all can follow that, even when it's tough. You know, I actually find, George, that some of the most present people are the people who don't have a lot, who are in the midst of tough times. And not only are they the most present, but sometimes they're the happiest. Maybe there's a connection there. I think so. Yeah, I think that there's a better way to interpret time. You know what I mean by that? And it seems that our culture on some level has rewarded those who see time as transferable to... I'm not sure about the right word, but it seems to me that time on some level is synonymous with consumption. And that's sort of true, but not really. Just because you have a lot of things doesn't mean you spent your time wisely. And we draw back to the people that may be the happiest. You know, a good anecdote is when you read biographies about people that went through traumatic events like World War I or World War II, they talk about all the trauma, but they go, it was some of the best times of my life. My whole family was there. We were making dinners together around this bomb shelter table. And let me tell you what we were talking about. Like, it's that time. It's the time with your family. And it's there for you if you're willing to have the courage to set aside the distractions, right? Does that sound right, about right? That sounds perfect. I'll give you a kind of a fun analogy from the swimming world. Yeah. So in a swimming stroke, there are two parts to a stroke. We're talking about freestyle, the crawl. Underwater, when you catch the water in front of you and you pull it underwater behind you, that part of the stroke is called resistance because you're having to resist the pressure of the water. You're moving the weight of the water behind you. Above water, once you've released the water behind you at the end of the underwater arm pull, From the time you lift your elbow above water to catch the water in front of you, you know what that's called, George? No. It's called the recovery. Now, to me, the go, go, go, the conception, the make it happen, the do things, get it done, that's resistance. That's where we're hustling, bustling, getting it done, shining, all that stuff. But here's the simple truth. You can be the greatest there ever was on resistance underwater. But if you don't have as equally effective recovery, where the goal of recovery is to let it go, is to completely relax. If you don't get as good at doing that as you are underwater, you're going to wear out. You're going to burn out. You're going to run out. All right. And so if you look at a great athlete, you know, I always been thinking like Michael Jordan. Here's Michael Jordan. You know, shh. the flying through the air. You ever notice his tongue? It looks like a dog's tongue. It's like hanging out and it's so loose because all that he's using is what's necessary, all right? And he's got a great recovery. To me, the times that we're present with ourselves, so that in a quiet time when we're out going on a walk, we're doing meditation, we're praying, we're listening to music, that part is being present with ourselves. But the recovery time in our relationships is when we're present with each other. And if you don't do that, all that underwater resistance ain't going to pay off in the end. It's going to wear you out. You'll get to the end of your life and say, why didn't I? That's what we got to change. We got to do it now. The most important words I've ever written, and most people think it's just about in your personal life, but I think it's in your private life and your professional life too. Most important words I think I've ever written say this, say the love we fail to share is the only pain we live with. And if we don't get that right, if we don't seize this woo, which is the window of opportunity, which is now, the love you failed to share could become the only pain you leave with. And that's too late. And what I'm talking about is seize that moment now when you can. And there are times you can't. There's times where you've got to get somewhere. It's got to get done. But I don't think there's a human being on this earth who couldn't be a little more present. who couldn't occasionally stop for a minute, recover and recover that relationship and express to somebody how much you appreciate them, how much you love them, how much they've impacted you, how much they've inspired you. So to me, that's kind of a fun little analogy. There's resistance and there's recovery, and you'll only recover when you're fully present. I love that. Thanks for sharing that. It makes me think of like Viktor Frankl's moment between stimulus and response. You know what I mean? Like you have resistance and recovery, but there is that moment when your arms coming up through that water and when you're present and you're aware of it and those distractions fall away, don't you get a real glimpse of what's important in your life? Isn't that why that moment of awareness is like, Oh, or that flash of insight they talk about or that discovery where things are discovered. Like that moment right there seems to be the difference between people who resonate at a frequency that seems to make them happy versus living in that resistance all the time. You know, I'm just like, I'm stunned because when you said that, I was just thinking about Viktor Frankl and Man's Search for Meaning. I mean, I'm not kidding. And I'm like, are you kidding me all right we're copacetic here man we're doing it right you know that is such a beautiful for anybody who has never read the book man search for meaning I read it at least once every three years all right I've read it many times because to me it's the the ultimate guide to understanding what really matters in life so For those who didn't know, Viktor Frankl was in Auschwitz. He survived perhaps the worst of all the concentration camps. And there's so many brilliant insights about what matters in life. But to me, the greatest one of all kind of leads us right to the next place. And that was, if you would have tried to predict which people, when they were put into the concentration camps, would make it through, the most cruelty, the most beatings and starvation, what would keep people alive? He said you probably would have been wrong in your guess because you would have just looked at the physical exterior of the people. He says those that survived were those that had a purpose left undone. A purpose left undone. Whether it was children they felt they must get back to, whether it was work they felt they alone must complete. It really taught me that if you're not inspired, you're on the way to getting expired. And so... know and to me the greatest truth that we can have is that inspiration is our choice you know too often we think about inspiration that it has to come from the outside you know doing what I do I'm called a motivational speaker george I'm a motivated speaker all right the motivation must be internal eventually or else it's not gonna it's not gonna last all right and inspiration is really about the choices that we make you know it really is about And when you look at that way, one of the books I wrote was called it's time for joy, how to become the happiest person, you know, and the whole purpose of that book was to let people know, see, we think joy happens to us. We hope it comes. But we can create joy in our life by the way that we choose to focus on controlling our controllables. That's the starting place. You know, I so often see who are the happiest people I know? Well, the people who focus on what they control and let go of what they don't control. They're people who are easy to impress and hard to offend. All right. And if you live your life with that mantra, I'm easy to impress and hard to offend, you're going to have a great life and you're going to have great impact on people. You know, the easy to impress part, it means that you're looking for the best in people. You're looking for the joy. You're looking for the possibility. And what you focus on is what you create. You know, whether you focus on the obstacle or the way around it. I'm calling America's breakthrough speaker because I've had a million people break boards in my event. It's a great metaphor and the most incredible seminar experience of actually applying the principles of breakthrough to a real life breakthrough. But ninety five percent of the breakthrough is not about your muscles or your coordination. It's about where you focus. If you focus on the board, you're going to get the board. If you focus beyond the board, you're going to get the breakthrough. And so that is the first of the three, what I call controllables that can lead you to joy and possibility and success is to focus on what you want. It's about shaping your future and knowing that what you focus on is what you create. The second, we can dive into these as we go along. Here's that swimming word again, dive. Okay. The second is to energize and engage yourself and your team. You know, when it comes to human performance, when it comes to Anything that's important, energy is such a key. And again, most people don't think of their energy like the weather. It's like, man, I hope the weather's good for, you know, over the holidays. I hope I have enough energy to make it through this week. But our energy is a matter of choice and very specific things we can do to elevate our energy by choice instead of chance. And the third controllable is to build people, build teams, and build relationships. I don't care what industry you're in, you're in the same business. It's a people business. It's how you grow and help others grow that will ultimately determine how far you can go. So I think that, you know, when you get down to it, happiness is a choice. Joy is a choice. Energy is a choice. And then you get specific about how do you cultivate those choices. Those are three brilliant points. And I'm going to dive into them. But before we continue diving in with our metaphors, I got a few questions stacking up. So let's come to the panel here. Sure. I got – this is coming from Clark in Arkansas. He says, you've helped countless people shatter their limits, but what's the one limit yet to overcome in yourself? What does that unresolved struggle say about the nature of human potential? Well, first of all, from Arkansas, you already know my favorite word, and that word is the word woo, W-O-O. Really fun to say woo. Out in Arkansas, they say woo-suey, all right? Go bowl those Razorbacks. But my way of woo says window of opportunity. The woo is the window of opportunity, which is every precious moment. And what I mean by that is you never know if the next person you'll meet today may become your lifelong friend. I have a feeling George Bunty is going to be my lifelong friend. Anybody who's thinking the same guy at the same time. So you never know if the next time you talk to your daughter or your son, there's something you say in that conversation. They'd be so on target for what they just couldn't see with their own eyes, but you saw it and you said it because you said it, their life got better. So really breakthroughs come when you seize the woo. So about me personally, what is the biggest, biggest window of opportunity? I haven't made it through yet. I think that it really comes down to living more and more and more of what I just said of being easy to impress and hard to offend. For me personally, that the easy to impress is natural for me I've always looked for the best in people I've always looked for the possibility rather than the limit maybe more in other people than myself I can be more critical about myself so there's a place to also break through the other one is the tougher ones when I've worked the most out of my life but I'm nowhere near there yet I want to keep going and that is being difficult tough to and difficult to offend easy to impress and hard to offend And here's why. Most of the time, it's not personal. If somebody's seemingly angry or whatever, it could be a miscommunication. They could have just found out a dear friend has cancer. They could have found out, all right, they could just be having a bad day. It isn't about you, and I know that. But my breakthrough comes when I live that more because I still can sometimes get spiked and immediately lash out instead of saying, and here's a great way. I've really tried to condition this question into myself to be more difficult to offend. When I start to feel that reaction, ask myself, what else could this mean? What else could this mean? And just asking the question softens that defensive reaction. So me personally, my goal in life is to be fully present in every precious woo. Am I there yet? Nope. Will I ever get there? Probably not all the way, but I just want to keep moving in the right direction. So what a wonderful question out there. Woo. Yeah, thanks. This one comes from Desiree. She says, if human potential is limitless, what do you think it means when someone fails repeatedly? Well, first of all, I believe that with every, thank you, Desiree. Where's Desiree from? Palm Desert. Palm Desert. All right. Out there. I've spoken Palm Springs for all state insurance. All right. So one of the greatest principles of breakthrough came from Napoleon Hill, who wrote Think and Grow Rich. It's an old book, but it's a classic. It's a masterpiece. And one of the things he said in that book is, within every adversity is planted the seed of equivalent or greater benefit. Within every adversity is planted the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit. In other words, Desiree, if you think of the hardest things you've ever faced in your life, the toughest times, the biggest failures, if you look at them as failures, when you step to the other side, if you got to the other side, weren't they often the things from which you grew the most? They weren't any fun in the middle, but man, they will help you get to the other side and find something you never would have found. So to me, you know, if human potential is limitless, I don't know whether that's true or not. I just choose to believe it. I choose to believe that we have more in us. Whether it's limitless or not doesn't matter. It's getting to our own level of potential. And to me, you know, John Wooden said this often. He says, failure is not fatal. Success is never final. So we're on a journey. And so to me, the most important thing we can do, I often say the greatest gift we're ever given is called today. Because we get a fresh start every day. Today we have a chance to be a better mom or a better dad than we've ever been. Today we have a chance to learn something we never knew before. Today we have a chance to come up with a new idea. We have a chance to be kind to someone who at that moment needs kindness more than ever. So we have that chance every day. And I see it as the road in front of us. And the metaphor is, Many times every day, sometimes very obviously and sometimes very subtly, we get to the same why in that road. One side goes off this way and it says, as soon as. Now, to me, as soon as looks easy. It's well lit. It's got no potholes. The lights are shining. It's repaved. The other side is now. Now is twisty and turny. There's ice patches. Lights are out. It's got ruts. But if you stay on the road called as soon as it's a direct road to never. All right. So the way to deal with quote unquote failure is to say, what can I learn from it? What am I going to do now? All right. And get out of the past because whatever that failure is, it's one thing for sure. It's in the past. It's done. You can't change it. And if you will live that way, number one, you'll become a blame buster because blame kills teams, families, and lives, you know, and if you think about blame in the context of time, Is blame about the past, the present, or the future? It's always about the past. So whenever you're in blame, you're in the past. You cannot do anything. It's like trying to get where you want to go in front of you by looking in the rearview mirror. It's not where you're going. And so to me, the key about failure is to look at it as a blame buster for yourself. Okay, this didn't work. I made a mistake. I didn't do it well. What can I learn? How am I going to get better? What is the seed of that equivalent or greater benefit? one last quick piece about this yeah um my my children are my greatest teachers and my daughter jenna my youngest daughter um if she was to say what was the hardest thing that ever happened to her life you could call it a failure if you want when she was twenty three years of age a man that she was about to become engaged to was found dead from a drug overdose or my beautiful daughter's heart and it was hard and she felt like a total failure she felt she blamed herself As her dad, I thought, I've got to fix this, but it wasn't mine to fix. So it was an incredibly difficult thing. Today, if she was on the show with us, George, we'd have to adjust the lighting because she shines so bright. And it was hard and it was tough. But what she emerged from that horrible tragedy was with the belief that she can handle life. That, will she ever completely heal that part of her that loved that man? No, it'll always be there. But she's learned to love more, care more, live more, and be more from an incredibly difficult thing. And there's a lot of people who face tragedy like that and give up because they keep the rest of their life locked into the past. And it took years. I'm not kidding you. It was tough for her. But she's going to get married in twenty twenty five to a man that she adores and adores her. And she's more loving and more kind and more. and happier than she's ever been. So again, failure is not fatal, right? And success is never final. Just stay on the path and keep choosing the now. Thank you for that. Thanks for sharing that. It's personal, but it's meaningful. And it brings up the question, and I think you've addressed it a little bit, but I think we can go deeper. Like this question of why me, especially when it comes to, I know people who have had their children die. My son died. I know people that have lost, whether it's a parent, a child, a loved one, a job, something else. But sometimes when these tragedies strike us, that hit us, just the ultimate gut punch, you find yourself in this sort of abyss, staring into this abyss, and it stares back at you. And you're like, why me? Why me? What do you say, Brian, when people find themselves in these traumatic events? Can that be an opportunity for growth? What do you do in those moments? How do you find the bliss there? Wow. I don't know that you're going to find the bliss immediately there for anyone. Right. That's true. And that's the first starting place. There's a thing called empathy. There's a thing called love and caring. With my daughter, I wanted to fix it, as I said, but it wasn't mine to fix. I didn't know what to do. But I will say this. This is probably the most magnificent lesson that came from that experience that I think you can apply to your question. Okay. For a while... After this happened, our world was dark. And my lovely daughter, who had been a joyful person and just fun to be around, was bitter and angry. And she struck out at her mother and I because I think deep down inside she knew she couldn't ever lose our love. But it was tough. She was mean. She would tell you. One day I was with her and I was walking on eggshells, which I had never done. I was the goofy dad. All right. I'm still the goofy dad. I got the stupid dad jokes. You know, they only laugh because they're so bad that they're going to, you know, we got to laugh. We got to humor the guy. Right. But I was not that dad at that time. I was walking on eggshells. I was so scared that she might hurt herself. I was so scared that she might give up. I was so scared that she would never be the same. And keep in mind, I'm America's breakthrough speaker. I'm the guy who teaches you to break through from fear to love, because that's the only breakthrough there ultimately is. You break through from fear to love. One day, I was in her room with her about four months after this had happened, still in the midst of the darkness. And she looked at me and she said, Daddy, I love you, but I can't stand you worrying about me all the time. And it just shook me because that's when I realized that everything I teach, everything I believe in, that what you focus on is what you create. that we have a choice about our energy, that we can build people and build teams and build relationships by being present. I was living none of those. I was living the exact opposite. I was focusing on the board instead of the breakthrough. And in that moment of her just powerful honesty, she grabbed my heart, she shook it, she opened my eyes, and I started being goofy dad again. And that was the best thing I could have ever done. And I'm not kidding you, George. Immediately, our relationship began to get better. I mean, it wasn't like night and day. It was subtle and a little inch by inch. But inch by inch, anything's a cinch. And it started going in the right direction instead of being held like being held underwater where we were just waiting to drown. Suddenly, we poked our head above water and realized there's still air out there. And that was the beginning of the path to where she's become now. So what do you do in those moments? You love people. What do you do in those moments is you do everything you can to focus on what, on, on shaping your future, energizing yourself and building teams and relationships. One more experience that, that really strikes the chord with that. I had to speak on September. So the day after nine, I had to go from Asheville, North Carolina, where we lived. I was supposed to speak in Dayton, Ohio, to a whole group of executives. I called up the University of Dayton that was putting on. I said, you're not doing this. Sorry. They said we called all of them and they want to do it. Oh, my gosh. OK, well, I had to drive there because there were no airplanes. And every mile I went further away from my wife and kids, the more I wanted to turn that baby around and get back to him. I didn't want to be there. But I had a responsibility. When you're a speaker, you're the show. You show up. And I got there, and I didn't pretend that it didn't happen. I didn't just go forward and teach my stuff. The first half hour of that day, it was a full day, was addressing the truth, was addressing what had happened. And it turned into one of the best days of my whole speaking career. I mean, because we said, we're not going to let this, we're not going to let this define us. We're not going to let this beat us. The worst thing we can do is give in and stop being who we want to be and going where we want to go. And it was hard that day. And boy, did I feel ready to hit the pedal to the metal to get back home to my wife and kids. But we have that within us. We still have a choice no matter how dark it is. So. You know, a fun way to put it, so we put it in a pleasant way. I told you, I called my grandson. His name is Augie. When Augie was three and a half, he was so good on his tricycle. He was like Evel Knievel, George, on that little tricycle. And he was so good. He'd go like five million miles an hour. He'd do these quick little turns. He was so good that his mom and dad thought, you know, he's ahead of the curve. Let's get him a two-wheeler bike for his fourth birthday. So on his fourth birthday, he gets a bike. Mom and dad are holding the back fender. He gets up on the little bike, puts his little hands on the handlebars, puts his little feet on the pedals, puts his little tongue out for balance. And he starts pedaling. And he's pedaling, and he's wobbling, and mom and dad are encouraging him, and they're holding the back fender. And finally, he gets enough momentum that he's doing it. He's riding the bike, and they let him go. And he's doing it way to go on me. But unfortunately, right in front of him on the sidewalk that day, was a great big rock. What did Augie look at? The rock. What happens next? Wham, he nails that rock. He falls over, not far to the ground, but you're four years old. He scrapes his little elbow up a little bit. He walks by dad, goes, dad, I'm cool, no problem. Goes up to mom, goes, mom, I'm gonna die. All right. So now, but now it's two weeks later, same little guy, same little bike, hands on the handlebars, feet on the pedals, no tongue out. Now you got this bike riding thing down, whipping down the same sidewalk, poppity, poppity, poppity, poppity pop bigger rock. What happens now? It goes around it. What goes around it first? Not the bike, his vision, his eyes. He sees the way around the rock now. Would it have done him any good to pretend there's no rock? There's no rock. There's no rock. There's no rock. Eyes closed. We have it be worse. There's rocks. There's rocks called COVID. There's rocks called losing someone we love. There's rocks called making a big mistake and wishing we hadn't done it that way. The key is don't pretend there wasn't a rock. Okay, this is what happened. And then start looking around it. Start looking for a better way. Start learning from that experience. If we live with that principle, what it means is I don't think we'll ever be able to get beyond feelings of sadness and pain, and we shouldn't. That's humanity. That's one thing that AI will never have is human emotion. But the more we focus on it up front, we work on it, we work on it, it will narrow the time that we stay in the darkness and we can start to move towards light again. I love it. I love the... the kid on the bicycle, you know, it speaks volumes because we're all that kid on the bicycle. You know what I mean? Like I can't help but think about some escapades that my kid had on a bike. One time when I was teaching her how to ride a bike, we were out in front of our yard and the same thing. She's got her hands on there. I'm holding the back of the bike. And I let go. And she goes for, you know, thirty yards. And she comes by this fire hydrant. She just loses her balance and falls over. And she goes so upset. Brian, she picks it back up, throws it down. I can't do it, Dad. I can't do it. And starts screaming. And I walk over to her and I'm like, stop. Look where you started at. She shifts her little head and she sees like the thirty yards that she was started at, picks her bike up and starts going again. But like I always held that with me. Like, man, I can use this because I feel that same way so many times. And if you just stop and look where you started, sometimes it's enough. Like, OK, I am making progress. OK, I am doing it. You know, all this imposter syndrome or all these things that we trick ourselves about, like you're not doing it. You're not good enough. Just stop and take a moment to celebrate the success that you've had. It might be one step. It might be something small, but it's usually there if you look for it, isn't it? It truly is. That's a brilliant insight and just really fun way to put it. I love it. That's so great. When I was going to Stanford, I volunteered at something where we taught disabled children to swim. And it was all volunteer program. And we had kids with extreme disabilities. We had kids who had cerebral palsy who were blind and deaf, had all three of those. We had severely autistic children. We had kids with Down syndrome. And what I learned from that was what you just taught us, George. the first experience where we had to have a little orientation. And I'm thinking, well, I'm a swim guy, man. This is going to be easy for me. And the woman who started this was a sixty five year old woman at the time who had just hustled to make this whole program possible. Got the pool built. It has to be a special pool. It has to be very warm. And she got it all done. She was feisty. Her name was Betty Wright. And So we got about twenty college kids who are going to volunteer for this program. We're sitting on the pool deck. She takes this young man who's probably thirteen or fourteen. His name was Colin. I'll never forget him. He's in a wheelchair. He's got severe cerebral palsy, so he's very spastic in his movements. He is blind. He is deaf. She rolls him to the edge of the pool in his wheelchair, and she dumps him in the pool. And I, as a swimming guy, I'm like, wait a minute, what are you doing? And then it gets worse because I hear this incredible noise as he's in the water. Like I'm thinking he's drowning. What are you doing? And she, she was so tough. She had white hair. Then she looks at me and goes, you stay on your head. Okay. Well, after a minute, I realized what the sound was. He was doing backwards somersaults. And every time his head came above water, he was laughing. This blind boy went to the bottom of this pool, which was about twelve feet deep. He knew every inch of the pool. And when he when he came up, I've never seen to this day, I've never seen anybody happier than that little than that guy than Colin was when he was in the water. And what Betty said was, Colin's been coming here since he was two years old. When he was two years old, he wasn't who you see in the water today. And it hit me that we can all learn. It may take a long time. You know, it may not be easy for some of us. You know, the truth is down syndrome. Kids are not gonna swim as well as Michael Phelps because their bodies are different. They're very dense. So they don't, they don't float, but they can swim and they can learn. And we, they take little tiny steps and we may. overestimate what we can do in a month and underestimate what we can do in a year. And so when you talked about, look at what you did. You went thirty yards. That's ninety feet. That's a big number. Right. That's when we get focused back on making that progress and realizing, wow, I guess I can. That's why I love that I have people break boards because I don't care who you are before you do it. And it's a metaphor. Everybody writes on the board something they want to break through. And on the back of the board, and it could be something, you know, fear of failure, procrastination. On the back of the board, they write down what's waiting for me when I have broken through. What am I going to do, be, feel, create, have in my life? But I don't care who you are, George. When you stand in front of that board, you don't know if you can do it. And you may be one percent thinking I can't do it. And you may be ninety nine percent sure you can't do it. But I don't care who you are. You don't know you can do it till you do it. And when you do that, when you step forward, what it leaves you with is what we want people to feel in their lives. Maybe I can, instead of maybe I can't or I never will. Maybe I broke that board and I wasn't sure I could do that. Maybe I could learn that language. Maybe I could heal that relationship. Maybe I could lose that weight. Maybe I could start that business. And as soon as you shift that way, just like your little girl getting back on that bike, suddenly she goes, maybe I can instead of, oh, I'll never do it. As soon as we do that, we're moving again. And that's a great place to be. That's where momentum comes from. I love that idea. Can it ever be a burden, though? I fly way too close to the sun. I can do anything, even though I can't. You know what I mean? I believe it to a point that's almost a fault sometimes. And it's had problems in my relationship. I can totally do this, but then I'll lose. And sometimes, as I've gotten older, I wonder, are unrealistic expectations maybe something that are driven into us at a young age so that we can believe to become anything we want? But maybe there are some unrealistic expectations. How do you factor in this idea of unrealistic expectations? Well, you know, I would rather fly close to the sun to tell you the truth. Me too. You know, would you, you know, whether you can't, you know, Henry Ford said, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. So I would much rather, you know, I believe in positive thinking, but realistic positive thinking, which means, you know, there may be bumps in the road. That's when you get back to, there are going to be rocks. But I also want you to know, everyone watching your show, as Coach Wooden said, there are no overachievers. You know, when I was a U.S. swimming coach, we had expectations that were created by time standards. In other words, to qualify for the national championships, you had to hit a certain time. And if you were one one-hundredth of a second slower, that's less than your fingernail, you missed it. You had to hit it or be under it. So we had some of these that were Actually, you could say imposed or created for us because our dream was to make it to the junior nationals or the nationals. To do that, you have to go fifty three forty nine and a hundred meter freestyle. Well, I want to tell you this, George. I had at least a hundred different kids over my career who hit the number exactly. They made their time standard exactly to the hundredth of a second. What you focus on is what you create. What it made me think of, what if the time standard was a second faster? I bet they didn't hit it then. So what I'm saying is there will be bumps and there'll be times when you feel like, man, I wish I could have done better or I wish I had done it differently. then use that again remember within every adversity he's planted the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit and get back to going for the sun baby go for it it's still there right and focus affirm that you are already there that's one of the most powerful ways to do it don't set goals and say I'm going to get there say I'm already there That's vital. You've got to see it as if it's real. And then breathe emotion into those affirmations. Emotion says what it feels like, how excited it feels you feel, how much joy it brings. And that fills your affirmations with positive emotion. And most of all, you know, the greatest human emotion, the one that really can make the biggest difference is gratitude. You know, there is a book called Power Versus Force. And it's a book about a guy who measured the vibration of emotions. He spent twenty five years doing this, that, you know, that we have different frequencies. Everything has a frequency and the emotion with the highest frequency is gratitude. So that means when you're feeling gratitude, there's no way you can feel sad. There's no way you can feel angry. Gratitude overpowers negative emotion. And so if you really live with a sense of gratitude, you're going to be, number one, you're going to be happier. Number two, you're going to have more energy in everything that you do. But it's easy to be grateful for the good stuff. Well, you've got to learn to be grateful for the tough stuff. You know, when I think of the holiday of Thanksgiving, we've all been conditioned to be thankful for all the good things in our lives, and we should. Embrace them, cheer them, celebrate them. But, you know, I want to be grateful for that time with my daughter that was hard. I want to be grateful for the times I wish I would have been better. I want to be grateful for the things that were my greatest lessons that often have come from the hardest, have been the hardest lessons. And that expansion of gratitude, not to just the stuff that makes you happy right away, but the stuff you have to learn from is a sure way to keep going towards the sun. Keep flying toward the sun, George. Don't let anybody stop you. Yeah, I can't. It's an obsession of mine. I can't help it. I'm going. It shows. It's seen on your face. One of the people that I've most admired in my life was a man named Dr. Norman Cousins. And nobody's heard of him before. Norman Cousins wrote a book that was called Anatomy of an Illness. And when he was in his twenties, Norman Cousins was diagnosed with a form of leukemia that was absolutely terminal, that he was given a very short time to live. But Norman Cousins, like you, wanted to go to the sun. And he had this belief that was just a belief. Nobody told him this. He believed that laughter strengthened the immune system. He believed that if you tighten up instead of lighten up, you're not going to be healthier. And so he got these old reel-to-reel black and white, old-fashioned silent movies like Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin. And this was in the fifties and he watched them over and over and over again. And he laughed. This guy could do one thing better than anything else he could laugh. And he laughed for months watching. That's all he did for three months after he got the diagnosis. Well, the terminal... Less than six months to live turned into, he died almost eighty years old. I saw him in his seventies speaking to a group of twenty terminally diagnosed stage four cancer patients in a support group. And you know what we did that those people did for that hour? They laughed. And I looked at Norman Cousins, who then was in his seventies, and his face, like yours, George, goes up from the laughter, from smiling so much, and his eyes had a little flicker that went up. And that is what we must recognize, is that that came from gratitude. Not from gratitude of the joy of being able to just keep laughing. To me, that's really the answer is that we have within us the capacity for great gratitude. And whenever you're feeling down, think about what you're really grateful about today. And if you can't come up with anything, make something up. And you'll start to move in the right direction. Yeah, it's a great metaphor and a great way to live your life, I think. You're only here for a short amount of time. What about people that say, you know what, Brian, this is all great and all, but I don't need breakthroughs. My life's just fine. OK, people say that. Right. I've heard people say that. And that's you know, that's that's again where you made your choice. You know, to me, though, what you're missing is my favorite word. I have this little thing I keep with me all the time. Humility. And anyone who's saying that may think they're humble, but they're really not, because here's the key. And humility has gotten a bad rep. And it's one of my most powerful desires is to shine a light on how important it is to be humble in your life. Because people think that when you're humble, you're not confident. No way. Have nothing to do with each other. You can be very confident and very humble. John Wooden was very humble and very confident. Because being humble doesn't mean you think less of yourself. It means you think of yourself less. But here's the answer for those people who say, I don't need anything else. I'm fine. Only those who are humble are lifelong learners because only those who are humble always believe there's something better. There's something that I can improve myself, that I can get better, that I could serve people better, that I could do something with more love. I could do something with more grace. I could do something. In other words, when you come from a place of humility, you're always looking to learn and grow from everyone in every situation. I only those who are humble would rather be wrong and learn something than pretend they're always right. And only those who are humble will give credit and take responsibility. And so to me, if you're saying I don't need anything else, well, that's okay. Live your life. That's fine. But you're missing out on a lot of joy if you just open up to, hey, what else can I do that can make somebody happy today? What else could I do to get in better shape? What else could I do? And you're missing out on that forward momentum. What you're doing is you're saying, okay, I'm not going in reverse, but I'll just stay in neutral. And you're probably not going to hurt anybody, but you're also probably not going to lift very many people. So life is about lifting. Yeah. Do you think that the way we transform society is by each individual becoming the best version of themselves? Absolutely. I mean, I don't want to get into politics, and so I won't. Right, don't. But at various times in my life, I've been pretty disappointed by the outcome of elections. But it hit me that, OK, what can I do about that? I can't change the outcome of that election. I can't pretend it didn't happen. What can I do? I can be the best person I can be. I can live my life in the direction of the principles that I thought were most important in that election. And I can be the best example of that possibility that I can be. And that's the way that I can maybe impact the most people. And if I can impact more people, that's why I wrote the book. The most recent book is called The Lessons from the Legends. I wrote it because I believe in character. I believe that we need to refresh and get better. pumped about the power of human character. The things like honesty, things like generosity, things like being able to disagree without being disagreeable, things like valuing and honoring differences rather than the fearing differences. These things are, these are things of character. And to me that, you know, I wrote the book to try to shine a light on those things that they actually not only are they nice, they work because the legends I wrote about exemplified them and they were the best there ever was at what they did. And so, yeah, your question is exactly right. We don't control anybody else, but we do have some measure of control of the way we live our lives. We don't determine what happens to us, but we do determine how we will respond to what happens. And so live your life the best way you can. Be the best example. Find the most joy and spread the most joy. And you'll make the biggest difference. You know, my favorite movie of all time is It's a Wonderful Life. It's the Christmas movie with Jimmy Stewart, who thought he didn't make a difference. He thought he had never lived his real dreams. He thought he had been a failure. But he always gets me. But he realized that he lived a wonderful life by doing the right things, by being the best he could be in a simple way. Yeah. I feel like when it's all stripped away, that's all that's left, right? It is. It is. Be the best version of yourself. It is. Be the best version of yourself, and you never know. See, when we do that, we don't realize we become the ultimate kind of generator of the ripple effect, you know? you never know if just stopping and saying to somebody like, I never know that this morning when I called my grandson to just applaud him for the way he did his Spanish, you know, he's going to be a little happier. He's going to maybe say something to a friend that he wouldn't have said. And that friend will say something to his sister and his sister will say something to his mom and it'll keep going and going and going. And it may get to somebody at a moment like my daughter had to go through and it may make a difference. So we never know. the expanse, how far that ripple effect will go. And we don't need to. We just need to start that ripple effect. But know that eventually it'll turn into a wave. And that's what we do by living our lives the best way we know how, to be the best people we can be. Yeah. I'm often conflicted about which one's better, the written word or the spoken word. And I'm curious on your opinion. You go and you speak to all these people and you've helped transform lots of people with a frequency, with incredible stories. Why write a book? Or maybe you can tell us about the process. Maybe you can do both. Why write the book, number one? And number two, what was that process like? Is it just compiling some of the speeches you had or were there like, wait a minute, I have an opportunity to put pen to paper. Let me do something different with the written word than I do with the spoken word. Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Nobody's ever asked me that before. And my answer is that they are different. It's like a lot of people don't want to see – if they love reading a book, they don't want to see the movie. Yeah, totally. Because it won't be as good as the book. me I try to keep them separate they're different they're different completely different things a book can can actually write down thoughts a movie can actually create a vision of things that you have to create yourself in a book so they're different they're just different different vibes and so is speaking and writing writing a book for me you know it's funny because when I wrote a book I wasn't thinking about selling it I wasn't thinking about I really don't know that I was thinking that much about people reading it. I was writing it because I wanted to express the things that I love in the best way I knew how. And writing. And so the process of writing, to me, is really about gathering these swirling thoughts that have always been in there, crystallizing them, and writing them down in such a way that when you step back, you go, wow, did I write this? That's pretty good. And so that's why I wrote my first book. Because I had a lot that I wanted that I've been teaching. And I believe in both these different mechanisms. Some people get more from a book and some people get more from an experience. That's the way it is. You know, as a coach, if you coach everybody the same, you are a lousy coach. And that's because people aren't the same. Some people learn by watching. Some people learn by listening. Some people learn by doing, you know, and as a coach, you know, you may have consistent systems and approaches, but if you're not paying attention to what works for that particular person, you're not going to be a great coach. You know, some people need a pat on the back. Some people need, you know, a kick in the tush. Some people need space. Some people need to actually get in there and do it. So to me, writing allowed me to reach some people that I may never reach in In a seminar, they may never go to an event. They may not learn that way. They love reading. Speaking at an event, I'm going to reach people who are there in a different kind of way. The classic study about communication says there are three elements of communication. There's the words we say. There's how we say them. That's our tonality. And then their third element is body language. And the study done at UCLA many years ago, it's been confirmed over and over again, sought to ask the question, what is the relative importance of those three in terms of communication working? Fifty-five percent of communication is body language. So it's not what we say or how we say it. It's what we're saying by our energy. Thirty eight percent is tonality. It's not the words we say. It's how we say them. And only seven percent are the actual words. And so to me, you know, that seven percent is more what the book is about. However, if I'm being a good writer, the energy and the and if I'm really putting my energy and then the way I would say it. in a good way on those words, they're picking up all of it. All right. It's easier in front of people though, because here's the truth. I don't care who you are. I don't care how well you say things. People will remember that much of what you say, but they'll never forget your energy. Yeah. They get your energy before you open your mouth. After you closed your mouth to get your energy over the phone, they haven't seen your face. They get your energy. The way you send emails, email does not stand for electronic mail stands for energy mail. For goodness sakes. I love it. I, I really admire the, I am a huge fan of language and behavior. Like it's fascinating to me to understand the way in which our words influence our behavior and vice versa. And it's interesting to see these dynamics play out. And you were a Stanford guy. Were you there for the prison experiments? Yes. Yes, I had. Philip Zimbardo was our, I was a psychology major. So he was, it was kind of cool. All of our textbooks were written by our professors. Can we dig into that a little bit? Sure, sure. I mean, you know, the prison experiment was, I actually sat in on a, where we, they brought in students to kind of do a makeup of it, you know, to pretend that we were in, that we were the prison guards. And, you know, so you go ahead, you explain it. I want you to explain it. I'll jump off of it. Okay, so the Stanford Prison Experiment was this incredible thought exercise turned visceral where two groups of students, well, one group of students was brought in at a point in time when there was a lot of anti-authority going on around the world. It's contagious. Get out of these knuckleheads, Vietnam, baby killers. You know, all this incredible energy is vibrating. You know, I think you had Timothy Leary around at that time. Like, tune in, drop out. Woo, people, Jimi Hendrix playing guitar. People dropping acid. Woo, things were crazy. So you have this incredible institution for higher learning. You have people really beginning to push boundaries on the ideas of behavior. And they bring in this group of students. and they randomly assigned them, you are criminals, you guys are officers. And they went the extra mile. They had the criminals picked up at their houses in cop cars, brought into this makeshift cell stripped down, and all... And then let's see what happens. What happens to these kids? I think that's a pretty good setup there, but maybe you could take it from there. You were there, man. I've never talked to anybody that was there. I've read about it. I've talked about it, but I've never spoken to anybody, man. So I'll jump off and let you go from there. What happened, man? What did you learn? What did you think was going on? So what it explained in the end, what they gained from it was a beginning to understand. If you think about Nazi Germany in the forties, People ask the question, how did these decent people go along with what was happening? How did they persecute and murder, put people in concentration camps, people who would be people like you see every day on the road? How did that get into their minds that this was okay? When you step back on the outside and the rest of the world looks and says, that can't be real. This prison experiment explained how it's done. Through very gradual steps, they got the prison guards to become more and more and more violent, more and more authoritative. And you'd think there'd be a point where they'd say, I'm not doing this. I'm not going to harm somebody. But because of that pathway, that way that authority worked in, they would act. The students would actually thought they were killing that person. They were not. That's how bad it was. That's how powerful we can be led when we don't open our eyes to what's going on. So that was, you know, it really helped us understand some of the most dastardly things. How did we get from this point to this point? We didn't jump all the way to my concentration camps. We did it in little steps and exactly the way they set up that experiment. It's incredible. It is incredible, and I think it speaks volumes of our relationship to authority on some level. As long as we become – as long as we have under the pretense that I'm just doing my job. I'm just doing my job, man. I'm trying to feed my kids, man. I have to do this, which leads – and I think this thread leads to this idea. There's a great quote that says the difference between a leader and a manager is that A leader does the right thing, and a manager does things right. I think that that seems to be something that happens in multinational corporations. You have this top-down structure with authority telling the guy that's the middle manager that scratched his way super hard, probably an awesome person, hey, tell these guys on the bottom, do it, or they lose their job. End of story. Shut up. Like that is toxic. That is what leads to workplace violence. That is what leads to that. But the people at the top seem to be cleared of that because they have this middle management on some level. Like, how do you, like, how do we, how do we get past that? That seems to be something that happens not only in companies, but in countries. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's, it's interesting as part of it is, is almost like folklore, if you will. And what I mean by that is, is that it's because we've created this belief that because you're the leader, You know more than I do. So to me, the work that I do, I'm called America's Breakthrough Speaker, and my foundational program is called Breakthrough Leadership. And I almost hesitate to say it because immediately people think I'm talking about the CEOs and the COOs, that leadership is about them. No, the message that I want to give is everyone's a leader. All right. How do you show up every day? That is personal leadership. How do you deal with adversity, with challenge, with success? That's leadership. Most important of all, what kind of impact do you have on the people around you? Do you lift them? Do you neutralize them? Do you knock them down? You're already a leader, right? So the starting place is to recognize that we are already leaders. Another place to step back and gain a viewpoint of what's important is to You know, I lived for twenty five years in Asheville, North Carolina. It is a beautiful place. We loved Asheville. We never would have left Asheville. We moved a year ago only. We only left because our grandchildren moved so far north that it was just too far to go to see him. Well, as you know, in the last month, Asheville has been devastated with a with a horrible storm that and the challenge with it was And they never saw it coming. I mean, Asheville is a place where you never thought it could happen. It's too far north, it's too far west. You just didn't think it could happen to Asheville. It's not like living on the coast of Florida, right? It just seemed like, how could this possibly happen? I mean, entire communities have washed away. There's nothing there, not a stick left. Every one of my friends had faced severe damage to their properties. But what's happening now? Everybody's a leader. More people are coming out to do good things, to step up and say, you know, I'm not going to wait for somebody to tell me to do this. I'm going to get out there and help. I'm going to get my chainsaw out. I'm going to help rebuild some houses. I'm going to volunteer to get food out to people. It's what's happening. You know, and we saw that for those who were around long enough. We saw for a while after after nine eleven, we were one. You know, people cared about each other. And they didn't care whether you were this side of the political aisle or that side. They didn't care if you were this religion or that religion. We just wanted to hold each other and help each other. And that only comes when we all recognize we're all leaders. And that there is that good in us. I had two friends who, when they retired from their careers, decided they would ride their bikes across America. So they started with their rear wheels in the water in Anacortes, Washington near Seattle, and ended with their front wheels in the water of the Atlantic in Far Harbor, Maine. And I asked them when they were done, what was the best part of doing this? And they both said, I asked them independently, because I was really interested. And they both said it renewed our faith in humanity. Said everybody cared about it. Everybody was supportive, whether they were in the city or they were in the country, whether they were Democrat or Republican or independent, whether everybody was just pulling for them and everybody was generous and thoughtful and kind. That's who we are. And so the only way that we can really, really break through that gap dichotomy if you will of there's leaders and there's managers or followers is recognize we're all self-leaders and to be the best self-leaders we can that's what this whole show has been about is making those choices to be fully present to give credit instead of and give credit and take responsibility to recognize that we're our best when we'll do others we'll do more for others and we'll do for ourselves right and recognize that we all have the capacity to choose to elevate our energy to be fully present to really be world-class buddy thinkers to do all kinds of things that lift the people around us we don't have to wait for permission you know and if we do wait for permission then we're saying I'm not at the cause of my life I'm at that I'm at you know I'm gonna I'm gonna I have to be told what to do. I love it. I got one more, Brian. You've been really gracious with your time. I got one more follow-up question here. It says, you inspire people to live boldly, but what do you think truly defines a life well-lived when it's all said and done? What will your last thought be when your time finally comes? Man, is that an awesome question because I often think of this. It's great to start with the end in mind, You know, most of us, you know, apply that to being a parent. Most of us as parents, we're just making it up as we go along or we're trying to remember how we were raised, which in many cases we may not want to be raised the same way we were raised. But if we have to start with the end in mind, we're going to parent differently. You know, and I'm really happy that I did that because when I when my children were little, I thought I asked myself and my wife together and I asked, what do we want for them when we're gone? We want them to be generous, joyful, kind, thoughtful, happy people. Do we want to define what they do? No. Do we care about how much money they make? No. What we care about are those things. And so that's how we parent it and get to that end. It's set our GPS destination. And so I often think, okay, when my life is gone, when I've said goodbye to this life, What are the three words I want people to remember me as? So it's kind of that same question right there. And it's kind of the words we talked about today. One is energy. I want to be remembered that I live my life with full out energy. Two is kindness. I want to be remembered as somebody who gave without seeking to get. Who loved the joy of giving. And the last is present. Since I believe that the way we really build people and build trust is by being present, I want to be fully present. So that to me would define a great life, being kind, being full of energy and being truly present. Those are fantastic words. And I'm super thankful. You've been really gracious with your time today, Brian. I really enjoyed the conversation. I felt like we were on the same frequency and wavelength, just kind of trading back. Thank you very much for your time and putting the book out there. Before we land the plane though, would you be so kind as to tell people where they can find you, what you have coming up and what you're excited about? Absolutely. And I got to come right back. You're just a joy, man. You're doing a great job. You're so much fun. And I knew we'd have fun, but when you said Viktor Frankl, at the moment I was thinking, I'm going, is this the Twilight Zone show? No, it's the True Life Podcast. So yeah, the easiest way to reach me and find out about me is to go to my website. It's just my name, brianbyro.com. There's kind of one fun thing on it. I love people if you have time because it's one of the videos on the screen is an actual main stage presentation I did as the opening speaker at the National Speakers Association this summer. It's forty four minutes and twenty nine seconds. But it's a it's a world record presentation because I had seven hundred and some odd people, speakers, professional speakers break boards in that amount of time in a very small room now. I've had more people break boards at events, but if you really want to get the energy, watch that video. And that's the way you contact me about speaking for your organization. I spent thirty four years as a speaker to reach one million people. My vision is to reach one million more in the next ten years. So I just turned seventy. I'm going to be eighty in ten years. By the time I'm eighty, I want to reach one million more. So get to my website and book me to speak. All right. And as far as my books go, the new book is called Lessons from the Legends. You can get that wherever books are sold and several of my books there. So if you're an Amazon person, go there. You can buy it on my website, but you can get it wherever you like to buy your books. Well, hang on briefly afterwards, Brian. To everyone else within the sound of my voice, I hope you're as inspired as I am on this beautiful Friday. Go out there and get it. Fly close to the sun. Be the best you can be. And if you find yourself in a moment where you're searching for something, check out Brian's website. Check out his books and just listen to this podcast again. Remember the words because you're enough. You're beautiful. And the way we get better is becoming the best versions of ourselves. That's all we got for today, ladies and gentlemen. We love you. Have a beautiful day. Aloha. Woo!